• If you listen to conservatives long enough, you’ll get a healthy dose of fear about turning the IRS into a police force. Well. “Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions.”

• A lot of people first got wind of Scott Walker when he sent back high-speed rail money to the feds. That cost the state $60 million, twice as much as what Walker wrung out of public workers in wage reductions.

• Walker also released emails that reportedly showed “mass support” from the public for his plans. Turns out there were a lot of negative emails in there too.

• Citizens United was really just a test run. Conservative activists want to abandon all campaign finance laws, period.

• Didn’t think I’d see Michael Gerson step out and criticize the hackish tactics of James O’Keefe in the NPR video. He didn’t go the full Anthony Weiner on the whole situation, but it was gratifying nonetheless.

• Not much for you on the Japanese nuclear disaster today. But here’s a history lesson about Chernobyl. While I believe that the Japanese are far more careful in this aftermath than the Soviets, it should be noted what a dangerous and long-lasting situation they’re dealing with. Meanwhile, safety measures at US nuclear facilities are under review, which is super-comforting.

• It wasn’t just Yemen that saw state-sponsored violence in response to peaceful protests today. See also Syria and the Sudan.

• Google’s Eric Schmidt could be named the Secretary of Commerce. He’ll need Google to figure out what the Commerce Department actually does.

• A majority of Americans support gay marriage for the first time ever. Things do change, however slowly. This could have a major impact on future court cases – judges will not have to go so far out on a limb. And by the way, we still have people literally being stoned for being gay, so this doesn’t mean we’re in some “post-homophobic” utopia yet.

• Ben Masel, a longtime marijuana legalization advocate, one-time Senate candidate and Daily Kos blogger, is dying of cancer. I saw him briefly back in Madison during the protests – he left a hospital bed to go to them.

13 Responses
to “The Roundup for March 18, 2011”

“Jack Balkin on Bradley Manning, Barack Obama and the National Surveillance State. Dead-on.” ; thanks David, can’t disagree with your perspective.
From the link: “The choice we face today, therefore, is not whether we will have a National Surveillance State, but the kind of National Surveillance State we will have– one that does its best to protect privacy, civil liberties and internationally recognized human rights in changing conditions, or one that debilitates or eliminates these protections and guarantees, and brings us ever closer to emergency government as a normal condition of politics.”

Guess us FDL’ers will have to get used to being “outliers in American politics; they will have no home in either major political party. Their views will be, to use one of my favorite theoretical terms, “off the wall.”

“The emergency financial manager law in Michigan is already having an impact on state workers.”; didn’t I read somewhere that breaking such contracts was against the U.S. Constitution?

“Missouri’s Attorney General states definitively that they’ve found fraud in the foreclosure process, in the same breath says they probably can’t prosecute anyone for it.”; BUT there could be civil, not criminal charges brought(which is why the Obama Admin is pushing the ‘resolution). the real point of it all is made when he states “But before an appearance at a South Side symposium sponsored by the activist group Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), Ommen said the trail of individual mortgages is as tangled as a a trashcan full of coat hangers, and even harder to unravel. “Loans have been totally seperated from individuals and institutions,” he said. “Loans are chopped into different pieces, sold and re-sold and re-sold again, maybe 10 or 15 times. Meanwhile the original paperwork is in a warehouse somewhere and no one knows where it is.”

Russian-born programmer gets 8 years in U.S. prison
“A U.S. District Court in Manhattan has sentenced former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov to eight years and one month in prison for theft of trade secrets and transportation of stolen property.
. . .
“The U.S. Justice Department has made the prosecution of high-tech crime a priority.”

“As the deeply divided state Supreme Court wrestled over whether to force one member off criminal cases last year, Justice David Prosser exploded at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson behind closed doors, calling her a “bitch” and threatening to “destroy” her.
. . .
“Prosser acknowledged the incident recently and said he thought it was becoming public now in an attempt to hurt him politically. Prosser faces Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg in the April 5 election.”